Top Ten Posts: Shakin' Sylvia and Jivin' Jean and all the rest

After a day sorting out the dreaded boat shed, discovering useful things like the small red balls that go in the Harry Potter game and a pick-up for an acoustic guitar, I have spent a little time sorting out my blog and found similar treasures.

Here's one: a new gadget called 'Popular Posts' which shows my top ten posts ever.  Spot it in the sidebar to the left. 

I am not surprised to see Sylvia Plath heading the list. On 'feedjit' below - and my statcounter - I see how often people search out and find Sylvia. She fascinates as a woman writer of genius who pushed the envelope and died too young.

Number two on the list is my poem on the Christchurch Earthquake, illustrating the 'after shocks' of that event - shocks that are still being felt physically, emotionally and financially.  Reading the poem on National Radio would have given it a boost. Jim Mora is the erudite host of Radio NZ's current events hour, The Panel, and he loves poet guests to read their stuff.

Third is Jean Batten (pictured) - who fascinates for similar reasons to Plath. Poets reading from Best NZ Poems are next up, followed Kate De Goldi's runaway success 10 PM Question.

After that, two light-hearted posts -- one on a funny novelist's t-shirt, and the other is a found poem on bongos that is so light its barely there. A lot of bongo players out there?

A pair of sestinas follow: Andrew Johnston's The Sunflower which inspired my Southern Man which comes straight afterwards. I am thrilled Andrew's poem is getting extra airplay here - it is a masterpiece and deserves it. And my sestina is one of the things I am most proud of this year. It took me over 20 hours to write (I went down the wrong track with the rhyme-scheme to start with), and when I finished, I was exhausted and bursting with pride. It felt like I imagine running a marathon would feel.

Southern Man was another poem I was able to read  on air, and subsequently had the most responses of any poem of mine ever - southerners and people who knew Alan (the Southern Man) rang and left messages, emailed, and stopped me in the streets and at parties. One woman yelled something over her shoulder as she cycled past one day. We were both heading towards the mountains I'd described in the poem and they shone in exactly the same way.

Number Ten is Emily Dickinson's poem Hope. Another woman of genius. A brilliant small poem.

Given my focus on poetry recently via Tuesday Poem (click on the quill in the sidebar to go there), and the increase in followers to this blog as a result, it's no surprise poems hold sway on my all time Top Ten. That could change of course. With summer holidays coming, I am planning to finish the children's novel and get on with Precarious. I won't have much time to blog, but do expect some posts on the difficulties of making hay while the sun shines.

Defending Sylvia Plath

Just discovered a marvellous essay on Sylvia Plath, in Slate, written back in 2003. It's called Poetry's Lioness - Defending Sylvia Plath from her Detractors,  and writer Meghan O'Rourke is responding to NZer Christine Jeff's biopic Sylvia. It's a same argument Pamela Gordon makes about her aunt, Janet Frame - that people are wrong to fossick around inside art determined to explain it by what happened in the life of an artist.

Here's O'Rourke:

Early on, feminists approached Plath's opaque poems as codes to be cracked with biography, teaching us to think of her as a woman whose art was entirely bound up in her personal grievances. In fact, the poems that Plath selected for Ariel are the least confessional of those she wrote during her last year of life; and, as scholars have pointed out, we can see from Plath's papers that she assiduously removed the most personal details, draft after draft.

(Here Pamela Gordon might part company with O'Rourke, as she would say it was male writers in this country - rather than feminists - who were guilty of boxing up Frame's art inside the frame of a vulnerable, highly sensitive woman, and refusing to let it stand alone.) O'Rourke argues it is reductive to view Plath as a 'death-obsessed neurotic' and see her work purely in light of this, and her suicide at age 30. There is a lot more to Sylvia Plath the artist than that, for example:

Sylvia [the movie] fails to explore the fact that Plath was one of the first major American poets to be a mother and to take the pleasure of motherhood as her subject.  

And then there's the poet's wit, her fascination with myth ... and more  .... it's worth a read. Although I'm not sure I agree with the beating O'Rourke gives the feminists. They weren't the only ones who trapped Plath's work inside her life story, more's the pity.

For an interesting link between Janet Frame and Sylvia Plath, go here.

Typewriters: the fates and fingers of authors

Oh Olivetti! My Olivetti. I am sure this is it. My first typewriter. I just found it on mytypewriter.com and this is what they say about it: A worldwide favorite of students, its also the perfect portable for everyone from poets to PTA secretaries. Yes, poets. That was me - tapping poems on those keys with the small dip for a finger tip, just so, and each key pressing a metal arm with two small metal letters on the end [lower case and upper case], or a question mark or colon or quotation mark, and each tap would push that letter or mark into the paper, and leave a small shapely dent. 

Then there was the ower of the 'shift' - push it down and the whole of the key structure would lift like subjects before royalty to make a lower case letter a capital letter. At the end of each line, the lever had to be grabbed and pushed along so the black rubber paper roller [known as the carriage] pulled the page up and along to the start of the next line. Ch-ding. And sometimes the ribbon spool would stop feeding the ribbon through and I'd need to fiddle with a tiny clip to make it run again, sometimes I wouldn't notice and the metal letters would tap on the same spot long enough to cut right through it, or sometimes the ribbon would run dry of black or red ink and need replacing. And to correct mistakes, there was whiteout in bottles or on slips of paper which you put under the key before pressing the letter again.

[You know, I wonder if the second Olivetti is more like mine in fact - plainer, a little heavier?]

There's something about the act of typing, something expressive about it. The whole body wields the arms which push the hands which tap those finger tips, and it's like the fingers push and dig at the same time. They work to get those letters onto the paper. And the act of pushing the carriage along to get to the next line is like being a conductor of an orchestra with all the energy and showmanship it implies. I remember my father - his big hands tapping, his whole body throwing itself behind them, chucking that roller along at the end of a line with a loud and satisfying DING. My mother was more circumspect more compact about it, less ding-y, really.

I suppose the amazing thing is both my parents used typewriters as both of them are writers. The Olivetti was theirs. I inherited it. I tapped my early poems on it, and my student essays. Stories sometimes too. I loved it. It made my poems look like poems and my essays look tidy and formal. It helped make me a real writer.

For some reason, after university when I left NZ to live in England, I bought myself a new typewriter. Had the old one broken? Or did I just want something fancy and new and mine? I bought an Olympia. It's still in the garage in its case. Or I think it's an Olympia. I should just go and check, but it's late. It certainly looked very like this - but perhaps a little smaller and lighter? I like the blurb that goes with it: The writer's typewriter of the 70s. Ever since their introduction, Olympia SM 8 & 9 models have been very closely tied to the fates and fingers of authors and writers. They're dependable, comfortable to use, and nice and solid in feel and function. This machine is probably the most preferred writing tool for anyone prefers a manual and it sure will serve for many years to come.

'The fates and fingers of authors and writers', well who can argue with that? I've just found out on typewriter.com [which has a host of bios of typewriting authors] that Paul Auster got an Olympia in the 70s, not long before I got mine. This is him on the left. But back when I typed on my Olympia in our small London flat not too far from Primrose Hill, I didn't know Auster's work. Back then, I was like Sylvia Plath, angrily tapping angry stuff, enough to annoy the elderly Hungarian refugee downstairs. Except this was Plath's typewriter below [the actual one apparently]: a large, heavy Royal.

Nik, one of my writing students, bought himself a Royal this year - like Hemingway rather then Plath. In fact here, thanks to the power of the internet, is Hemingway's actual typewriter. 

It's been lovely reading typewritten work again. The way it's not absolutely perfect. The way you can see how the letters have found their place on the page, and without too much trouble you can imagine the noise and the orchestration behind them; and then it's no small leap to imagine the brain fitting those letters together to make the words. This is writing as a physical act, a theatrical, memorable act - my father throwing the carriage along so hard I suspected it might part with the typewriter one day, neighbours agitated with the angry clatter of my poems, and Auster - look at him - his fingers are fair twitching with expectation.

Frame and Plath

Dear mother, dear father dear husband dear child,
there is no answer,
this microphone like a beehive celled with honey
is blocked forever with the sweetness of death.

In February 45 years ago, Janet Frame started to write Towards Another Summer which was published postumously last year. Three days before she appears to have begun work on it, Sylvia Plath had committed suicide. Frame's literary executor and niece Pamela Gordon says the events were not unrelated.

One example she gives is the poem above which is in Towards Another Summer and, as Pamela says, 'is redolent with Plath-like poetic symbolism and does seem to contain a reference to the BBC radio recording (of Plath re-played the week of her death) which Frame would have been familiar with.'

Pamela says Frame, who was living in London at the time, grieved for Plath. Read more in a fascinating post on Pamela's blog Slightly Framous. Interestingly, the post seems to have been triggered by an earlier post here on literary crushes.

literary crushes

This is one of a series of paintings by Australian painter Gary Shead about D.H. Lawrence's time in Australia. He's communing here with a
magpie, a cockatoo? and a kangaroo, who all seem up on dinner party etiquette (see previous post). Although this painting, in contrast to Sue Orr's book cover, has a distinctly 'Last Supper' feel to it, with Lawrence the Christ-figure.

In fact, I took the image from Australian writer Gondal-girl's blog where she talks about a crush she had on Lawrence - exacerbated by the fact of his having visited Australia once. She asks about other people's literary crushes.

So I had a think about mine and came up with: Byron (his desire to fight on behalf of the Greeks - my father's people - vs. the Turks and his feverish death in Messolonghi added to his mystique), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (that feverish imagination of his captivated me and my friend Sandra, we poured over his poetry in my dark flat in Aro Valley) and Yeats (his political activism, his poetry, his connection with the Theosophists were a compelling mixture - I remember discussing gyres for hours). These were my romantic teenage crushes, and I quoted them, read them, tried to write like them.

Sylvia Plath was more serious than that. I really thought poetry had to be dark and confessional to be worth anything, and I used her poems as models for the dark, confessional stuff I wanted to write with lines like 'I am in the bird-tree and my throat aches'. Her struggle as a writer who was a woman and mother meshed well with my uncompromising 70s/early 80s feminism . I didn't like Ted much then (this changed with The Birthday Letters and his Collected Letters). I read everything I could about Sylvia and by her, especially her letters. When I went to London I wandered around Primrose Hill where she lived and died ... wrote anguished poems about it ...

I recently saw a one-woman show about Plath at Circa in Wellington. Spookily the Olympia typewriter the actress used as Plath was identical to one I had used in London to type up those anguished Plathian poems. None, thankfully, published. I still 'notice' Plath but I don't feel moved to read everything about her anymore, let alone write like her. Although I still envy her enormous talent and detest the way she died.

Interestingly, in the recently published Letters of Ted Hughes selected by Christopher Reid (Faber), Hughes suggests she wanted to be saved, and blames himself for not getting to her in time. Or that's my recollection - must go back and read those particular letters again.